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3/16/2018 Julian Beck: the state will be served even by poets | Jacket2

JEROME ROTHENBERG
Poems and poetics

Julian Beck: the state will be served even by


poets
JEROME ROTHENBERG

[Reposted here as a follow-up to recent discussions of the use of Ezra Pound’s name by the
neofascist Casa Pound party in Italy, as a reminder of the larger problem that confronts us, even
today, even as poets. In memory, too, of Julian Beck and Judith Malina. (J.R.)]

the breasts of all the women crumpled like gas bags when neruda wrote his hymn celebrating the
explosion of a hydrogen bomb by soviet authorities

children died of the blisters of ignorance for a century more when siqueiros tried to assassinate
trotsky himself a killer with gun and ice

pound shimmering his incantations to adams benito and kung prolonging the state with great
translation cut in crystal

claudel slaying tupí guaraní as he flourished cultured documents and pearls in rio de janeiro when he
served france as ambassador to brazil

melville served by looking for contraband as he worked in the customs house how many taxes did he
requite how many pillars of the state did he cement in place tell me tell me tell me stone

spenser serving the faerie queene as a colonial secretary in ireland sinking the irish back for ten
times forty years no less under the beau monde’s brack

seneca served by advising nero on how to strengthen the state with philosophy’s accomplishments

aeschylus served slaying persians at marathon and salamis

aristotle served as tutor putting visions of trigonometrics in alexander’s head

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3/16/2018 Julian Beck: the state will be served even by poets | Jacket2
dali and eliot served crowning monarchs with their gold

wallace stevens served as insurance company executive making poems out of profits

euclides da cunha served as army captain baritoning troops

and even d h lawrence served praising the unique potential of a king

these are the epics of western culture


these are the flutes of china and the east

everything must be rewritten then

goethe served as a member of the weimar council of state and condemned even to death even to
death

this is the saga of the state which is served

even to death

pinerolo to faenza palma de mallorca paris roma


november 1976 august 1979

Poet, painter, actor, and director, Julian Beck (1925–1985) was the cofounder with Judith Mailina of
the Living Theater. Their influence and dedication to a liberatory poetics has continued into the
present, and the Living Theater in its most recent incarnations has continued to remind us of what
poetry at its most extreme and experimental still has to offer: “an archimedean point of imaginative /
construction, / in which we can be energized, our resourses shored” (C. Bernstein). For all of that,
the poem above is a kind of countermanifesto, a warning of our susceptibilities, the temptations to
act against our better nature. [Reprinted from semi-perishable membranes: twenty songs of the
revolution, as it appeared also in the “Art of the Manifesto” section of Poems for the
Millennium,volume two.]

March 14, 2018


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